Honey bees use different sets of genes, regulated by two distinct mechanisms, to fight off viruses, bacteria and gut parasites, according to researchers at Penn State and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

A team led by New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute scientists conducted a study comparing induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and embryonic stem cells created using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). ...

The Canadian Macromolecular Crystallography Facility (CMCF) has announced the successful solution of 500 protein structures using the Canadian Light Source. The 3-D structures of proteins can be determined ...

(Phys.org) —A team of Israeli, Spanish and German researchers has for the first time created a map of gene expression in Neanderthals and Denisovans and has compared them with modern humans. In their paper ...

A group of scientists from Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute and UC Berkeley report the first mapping of genome methylation in the fruit-fly Drosophila melanogaster in their paper "Genome methylation in D. mel ...

Scientists at Indiana University have unlocked one of the mysteries of modern genetics: how acquired traits can be passed between generations in a process called epigenetic inheritance. The new work finds ...

Say "malaria" and most people think "mosquito," but the buzzing, biting insect is merely the messenger, delivering the Plasmodium parasites that sickened more than 200 million people globally in 2010 and ki ...

Researchers studied the role of DNA methylation on gene expression and other processes in the heavy-metal reducing bacterium Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 with the help of next-generation Single-Molecule Real ...

Many animals, including humans, have internal clocks and calendars to help them regulate behavior, physiological functions and biological processes. Although scientists have extensively studied the timekeeping ...

Researchers in Singapore have developed and tested mathematical tools, or algorithms, that are more accurate and robust than those currently used in analyzing high-throughput genetic sequencing data. The ...

Microelectronic engineers in Singapore have developed and tested sensor technology that can detect and measure a chemical signature of bladder cancer. The light-based sensor could eventually be used for the ...

Scientists have long known that control mechanisms known collectively as "epigenetics" play a critical role in human development, but they did not know precisely how alterations in this extra layer of biochemical instructions ...

Collaborators from Mayo-Illinois Alliance for Technology Based Healthcare have developed a new, single molecule test for detecting methylated DNA. Methylation—the addition of a methyl group of molecules to a DNA strand—is ...

(Phys.org)—Scientists from the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research and the Biozentrum of the University of Basel have published an important proof-of-principle study showing that a computational ...

DNA methylation

DNA methylation is a type of chemical modification of DNA that can be inherited and subsequently removed without changing the original DNA sequence. As such, it is part of the epigenetic code and is also the best characterized epigenetic mechanism. Because methylation is a common capability of all viruses for self non-self identification, the epigenetic code could be a persistent remnant of ancient viral infection events.

DNA methylation involves the addition of a methyl group to DNA — for example, to the number 5 carbon of the cytosine pyrimidine ring — in this case with the specific effect of reducing gene expression. DNA methylation at the 5 position of cytosine has been found in every vertebrate examined. In adult somatic tissues, DNA methylation typically occurs in a CpG dinucleotide context; non-CpG methylation is prevalent in embryonic stem cells.

In plants, cytosines are methylated both symmetrically (CpG or CpNpG) and asymmetrically (CpNpNp), where N can be any nucleotide but guanine.

Research has suggested that long term memory storage in humans may be regulated by DNA methylation.